Four Traits Make a Great Secretary of State

Dec. 5 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. secretary of State
sweepstakes is on. Who’s it going to be? Susan Rice, John Kerry,
Tom Donilon or some mystery candidate who will surprise us all?

Forget the who for a moment. What does the nation’s top
diplomat need to succeed? Above all, a close bond with the
president. Having worked for a half-dozen secretaries of State,
I’ve developed four essential criteria for what it takes to be a
truly consequential one.

1. Anatomy really is destiny. Freud was probably talking
about gender differences here. The ability to project a physical
presence and persona is critical to success in politics and
foreign policy. This isn’t necessarily related to physical
stature or gender. Henry Kissinger hardly looked as if he had
walked out of a GQ photo spread. Yet he had star quality. As
does Hillary Clinton. Not so much for Warren Christopher -- a
man of stellar character yet hardly imposing persona.

F. Scott Fitzgerald held that persona flowed from an
unbroken series of gestures. Effective presidents and
secretaries of State are actors on a public stage; they require
charm, flattery, toughness and drama to make allies and
adversaries take them seriously, particularly in a negotiation
or crisis.

When a U.S. secretary of State walks into the room, either
here or abroad, his or her interlocutors need to be on the edge
of their seats, not sitting comfortably, wondering how best to
manipulate the secretary. If anything, they should be worried
about being manipulated themselves.

Marshall’s Grandeur

That means playing a number of roles, sometimes with high
gestures of real or feigned anger, frustration or
disappointment. At the 1948 Senate hearings on the plan for
European recovery that would bear his name, George C. Marshall,
whom columnist James Reston described that day as displaying
“moral grandeur,” silenced an interrupting senator with a
single glare. Kissinger threatened to walk out on Syria’s Hafez
al-Assad at least once; James Baker did the same with Assad, the
Palestinians and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

2. You must have the negotiator’s mindset. By definition,
effective secretaries of State conduct negotiations, defuse
crises and tackle issues that normal human beings consider very
hard. A coherent worldview is important too, but not as critical
as the instinctive ability to know how to make a deal, sense the
opportunity, and then figure out how to close it.

Kissinger may have been the grand strategist, but both he
and Baker had the negotiator’s mindset, the ability to figure
out how to assemble the pieces of the puzzle strewn on the
living-room floor and stay even when all the pieces didn’t quite
fit. Kissinger’s Middle East diplomacy -- three disengagement
agreements after the October 1973 war -- is a remarkable
testament to those skills. The one between Israel and Syria
still survives, while the other two, between Egypt and Israel,
evolved into a peace treaty. You can’t learn these things in
school.

Marshall was a military man; Kissinger an academic; Baker a
lawyer. All possessed a natural ability to gauge how to move the
pieces around on the board.

Effective secretaries of State are manipulators, no matter
how politically incorrect that sounds. Deception is sometimes
required, and they maneuver constantly, trying to figure out
what’s necessary to succeed and how to use incentives, pressure,
arm-twisting and, when necessary, untruthfulness (either by
omission or commission) to manage a crisis or close a deal.

Kissinger’s Strategy

Baker and Kissinger weren’t sentimentalists. To close their
Middle East deals, they trash-talked Israelis to Arabs, and
Arabs to Israelis. They threatened when they had to and conceded
when they had to, never losing sight of their objective or of a
backdoor to get out if they couldn’t accomplish it. Nice
secretaries of State are usually ineffective secretaries of
State.

3. You need to be lucky. Karl Marx was right. Individuals
make history, yet rarely as they please. Luck means being in
office at a consequential moment and also at a time when U.S.
diplomacy can be effective. There are endless crises abroad. Yet
without one that is amenable to American suasion and power, they
will continue to elude solutions. Hillary Clinton faced crises -
- nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq, civil war in Syria,
nuclear diplomacy with Iran -- that simply were either not
susceptible to resolution or ripe and ready enough.

Compare that with the situation that Kissinger faced after
the 1973 war where the Arabs and Israelis faced real urgency and
pressure to come up with an agreement; or Baker’s diplomacy
leading up the Madrid peace conference where the U.S. had
leverage and power. Woody Allen was wrong. Eighty percent of
life isn’t just showing up; it’s showing up at the right time.

4. The president must have your back. Without this, the
game is over before it begins. All presidents support their
secretaries of State, but not all get the support critical to
success. Baker used to say that he was President George H.W.
Bush’s man at the State Department, not the State Department’s
man at the White House. Those two were particularly close, and
it gave Baker real authority, power and street credibility.
Kissinger and President Richard Nixon, on the other hand, were
more competitive, though each exploited the other’s talent and
authority to command and marshal respect and power.

If there’s daylight between the two or if it’s clear that
the White House isn’t giving the secretary the power to take on
important issues, the latter’s status is diminished. The
president not only needs to tell the world that his secretary of
State is a trusted confidante. He also needs to demonstrate it.
If Obama doesn’t charge the secretary with responsibility for
tackling the biggest challenges, how does he or she become truly
important?

Albright’s Moment

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Obama has been a
very withholding president on foreign policy. All presidents
keep tight reins, particularly on matters regarding war and
peace and on matters that resonate politically at home. Yet they
can still empower their secretaries of State. Madeleine Albright
worked for a year and half to set up an agreement between
Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat that President Clinton
brokered at a summit in the fall of 1998.

Obama didn’t give Clinton that chance. She was a fine
secretary of State in many areas: fighting for and reforming her
department; pursuing a 21st agenda of planetary humanism (gender
issues, the environment, and media and technology); and
improving America’s image abroad. Yet the White House owned all
the critically important issues regarding Iraq, Afghanistan, big
think strategy on Iran, the Arab-Israeli conflict or the U.S.-
Israeli relationship. She didn’t own a single one.

To deal with a withholding president, access, trust and
empowerment are critical. Without that in the secretary of
State’s pocket, it really won’t matter all that much who’s
running Foggy Bottom.

So that argues for Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations, who among the likely suspects may be the most
trusted and loyal, particularly after the beating she’s taken
publicly over the attack on a consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Whatever her shortcomings, undiplomatic nature and crusty
exterior, she has what every secretary of State must have: a
close bond with the president. If Obama decides to risk a tough
confirmation fight, she’s your next secretary of State. You can
bet your striped pants or pants suit on it.

(Aaron David Miller is vice president for new initiatives
at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He
served as an analyst and negotiator on the Middle East in
Republican and Democratic administrations. The opinions
expressed are his own.)